feed for patients who have trouble swallowing up to 8 hours. Parents
find it helpful that our texts state the time that their child should stop
drinking whichever liquid.
Tech challenges
If you'd like to implement a texting system, give yourself a lot of time
to smooth out the technological kinks. It took us a year to launch, a
lot longer than we'd initially thought. We had a few starts and stops
along the way.
• 160 characters. We worked long and hard with our texting vendor
to customize our messages, but it's not easy summarizing NPO
instructions in less than 160 characters. That's precious few words,
trust us. We wanted the instructions to be clear, but we worried if too
little info would be helpful.
• Frequency. Outpatient areas of Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh
were already using the cloud-based messaging platform, but it took
some trial and error to synchronize sending multiple texts over multi-
ple days — rather than sending, for example, a single text about the
expected ER wait time.
• Daily patient database. Each day, we place what we call a daily
drop of patients into the texting database. When we launched our
service, however, we failed to filter out canceled patients and inpa-
tients, so early on both these groups received texts not intended for
them. Our IT team was quick to fix this glitch so that we can upload
the patient Excel file to our vendor for the next 7 days.
• Staff pushback. We initially had some pushback from our phone
call nurses who felt the program would be too time- and labor-intensive
for them to manually key in patient data into the texting module. But
when they saw how intuitive the program is — it automatically com-
2 4 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 9
Business Advisor
BA
